This topic brought back a lot of memories from my youth when we heated our home with a couple of fireplaces and a laundry heater! For the uninitiated, a full coal scuttle is heavy when you are six and the coal pile is 50 feet from the house. It's gonna be one heck of an emergency before I want to do any heating with coal!

Anyway.........a search under "heating with coal" on Google will yield a ton of information on the topic.